In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

In no field of science is the gulf between appreciation and importance as wide as it is for metrology.

It’s not about the weather. Metrology is the science of measuring. It has a longer history than the modern sciences taught in school, and it’s essential to all of science’s usefulness and power. Without sound metrology, there’d be no trips to the moon, no modern medicine, no self-...

Black holes capture everything they encounter. From subatomic particles to stars, solids, gases, liquids and even light, everything falls irretrievably in. And even more assuredly, black holes capture the popular imagination.Thinking about space, as humans have since they first gazed at the points of light decorating the nighttime sky, triggers the mind to imagine things that cannot be...

Long before there was a periodic table of the elements, there was no need for a table — just four chairs.

From ancient through medieval into early modern times, natural philosophers could count the known elements with the fingers of only one hand (with no need for the thumb). All material reality, nearly every authority concurred, was built from only four elements. And those four...

At the heart of No Beast So Fierce is a simple and terrifying story: In the early 20th century, a tiger killed and ate more than 400 people in Nepal and northern India before being shot by legendary hunter Jim Corbett in 1907. Rather than just describe this harrowing tale, though, author Dane Huckelbridge seeks to explain how...

Identifying anniversaries to celebrate is not exactly the most pressing issue facing the scientific community these days.

There’s much more important stuff. Like articulating the seriousness of climate change and searching for new knowledge that will aid in combatting it. Or coping with sexual harassment and discrimination. Or securing reliable funding from a nonfunctioning government....

It’s another raw day in St. Petersburg, Russia, but the man striding down the University Embankment along the Neva River isn’t pondering how the icy wind off the Gulf of Finland chills his bones or whether Emperor Alexander II’s reforms will increase salaries for professors like him. Instead, Dmitrii Mendeleev is imagining how he could reveal the chemical underpinnings of the universe...

Quantum physics has earned a reputation as a realm of science beyond human comprehension. It describes a microworld of perplexing, paradoxical phenomena. Its equations imply a multiplicity of possible realities; an observation seems to select one of those possibilities for accessibility to human perception. The rest either disappear, remain hidden or weren’t really there to begin...

Just two months after the end of the successful first manned Apollo flight ... three astronauts are ready to fly this Saturday to within 70 miles of the lunar surface.... The Apollo 8 plan is for the astronauts to fly as many as 10 orbits around the moon before heading home. — Science News, December 21, 1968